Mira Ashwood's POV
The door slammed so hard the whole wall shook.
Mira spun around, but she was already too late. The lock clicked from the outside a heavy, final sound, like a period at the end of a sentence that said you have no choice.
She grabbed the handle and pulled. Twisted. Yanked until her palms burned.
It didn't move.
"Let me out!" She banged her fist against the door. "Hey! I said let me out!"
Silence.
She backed away from the door and looked around. The room was small and dark. Stone walls. Stone floor. A narrow bed with a rough blanket. A single candle on a table, already burning low. No windows. Not even a crack of light from outside, no way to know if it was night or day or the middle of something worse.
The Shadow Citadel had seemed terrifying from the outside. From the inside of a locked room, it was somehow worse.
Her chest tightened. She didn't like small spaces. She'd never liked small spaces. Back home in Oakheart, she used to sleep with her curtains open so she could see the sky. She'd told herself it was because she liked the stars. Really, it was because she needed to know the world was still out there.
There was no sky here. There was nothing here.
She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands to her knees to stop them from shaking.
Don't panic. Think. Think.
The last twenty minutes replayed in her head like a film on fast-forward. After Marcus's phone call, the SUV had never reached the Academy. Shade had told Marcus to turn around. They'd driven in silence back toward the Mistwood, and when they reached the gates of the Shadow Citadel, Shade had stepped out first and turned to face her.
"You're staying here," he'd said.
"I'm not staying anywhere you tell me to stay."
"It wasn't a request." His silver eyes had been unreadable. "Until I figure out what you are and what you mean to that cult, you don't go anywhere. You don't speak to anyone. You stay in the Citadel where I can"
"What? Keep me locked up? Like a prisoner?"
His jaw had tightened. "Like a Healer-Slave."
The words had hit her like a slap. Healer-Slave. Not a person. Not even a name. A title that made her sound like a tool he'd found on the ground and decided to keep.
She'd looked at Marcus. Marcus had looked at the floor.
Two of Shade's wolves had stepped forward big, silent men with tattoos and blank expressions and that was how Mira Ashwood, who'd survived a cult army and a magic forest and her own sister's betrayal, had ended up locked in a windowless room in a castle made of dark glass.
She pressed her palms harder against her knees.
I hate him, she thought. I genuinely, completely hate him.
Not ten minutes ago in the car, she'd almost felt something for him. Almost. He'd looked at her with those silver eyes and talked about two hundred years of silence, and some stupid, soft part of her heart had cracked open like an egg.
Foolish. So completely foolish.
He was a monster. He'd just proven it. The moment he didn't need her warm hand to calm his precious curse, he'd slapped a title on her and locked her away like she was a piece of furniture that only mattered when it was useful.
Healer-Slave.
Mira stood up. She wasn't going to sit on this bed and cry. Crying was what she'd done after Silas rejected her at the festival, and look where that had gotten her running into a cursed forest, crashing a stolen truck, getting dragged to the feet of a rogue king.
She was done crying over people who didn't deserve her tears.
She crossed to the door and examined it. Solid wood, iron hinges, the lock on the outside. She pressed her palm flat against it and closed her eyes, the way she'd done in the Mistwood when her power had surged without warning.
Nothing. Whatever Mirror-Touched meant, she couldn't turn it on like a faucet.
She tried the walls next. Pressed her hands to the stone, searching for anything soft, any crack, any place where the mortar was loose. Nothing. The Citadel had been built by someone who didn't want things getting out.
She sat back down.
The candle flickered.
And that was when she noticed the food.
It was on the table beside the candle a plate she hadn't seen in the dark. Bread. Cheese. A cup of water. Simple, plain, and there. Someone had put it there before she arrived.
She stared at it.
Shade had known he was bringing her here. He'd had someone prepare this room before Marcus's phone call. Before the SUV. Before the decision to come back.
Which meant he'd been planning this longer than he'd let on.
He never intended to take me to the Academy.
The thought settled over her cold and heavy. She'd thought the Academy was the plan safety, help, answers. But Shade had known all along that she'd end up here. He'd just been waiting for the right moment to stop pretending otherwise.
She picked up the bread. She was furious and terrified and completely trapped, but she was also starving, and being hungry on top of everything else felt like too much.
She ate.
The candle burned lower.
She was halfway through the bread when she heard it a sound from the other side of the wall. Not from the door. From the wall to her left. Faint at first, like wind through a crack. Then clearer.
Breathing.
Someone was on the other side of that wall.
Mira set down the bread and moved closer. She pressed her ear against the stone.
"Hello?" she whispered.
A sharp intake of breath. Then silence. Then, very quietly, a voice young, scared, and female.
"You can hear me?"
"Yes." Mira's heart kicked into gear. "Who are you? Are you locked in too?"
A pause. "We're all locked in. All of us." Another pause, shorter. "How long have you been Mirror-Touched?"
Mira went very still. "How do you know what I am?"
"Because we are too." The voice was barely a breath now. "There are six of us. He has six of us in here. He told us all the same thing that we were Healer-Slaves. That we were here for our own protection." A sound that might have been a bitter laugh. "He's been saying that for months."
The candle went out.
Total darkness. Thick and complete and pressing in from every side.
Mira's breathing spiked. She pressed both palms flat against the wall and held on like it was the only solid thing left in the world.
"What's your name?" she managed.
"Lena." A pause. "Mira that is your name, yes? I heard him say it to the guards."
"Yes."
"Mira." Lena's voice dropped to almost nothing. "He doesn't keep us here to protect us. He collects us. Holds us close because our power keeps his curse quiet. We aren't Healer-Slaves."
Mira waited, cold creeping up her spine.
"We're batteries," Lena whispered. "And when one of us stops working when one of us runs out of power from being used too much" She stopped.
"What happens?" Mira breathed. "What happens when you run out?"
Silence.
Then, from somewhere down the hall outside her door, heavy footsteps began walking toward her room.
Lena's voice disappeared entirely.
The footsteps stopped right outside her door.
The lock turned.